Chapter 20

Although she had promised herself to spend only a week on each book, ultimately she had dedicated a lot more time to them. Adair had tried to keep away from the books, but with Hank restricting the area she could explore and not much else to do, they had been the only things that kept her occupied inside the forest.

Neither rigorously searching for any type of patterns in the picture books nor repeatedly writing with her finger on top of the books had helped her in any way. Eventually, she had asked the nearby Hank for help. At first it appeared as though did not want to help her with this endeavor but after bugging him for a while he gave in. At least there was no need to bribe him with alcohol and I only needed to bug him for a bit to get him to help Adair thought. Together, Adair and Hank had tried out several things.

First they verified whether Hank was still unable to open the books. Alas, nothing had changed from when they first found the book. As soon as the bear so much as touched the books, they would disappear back into the bag. For the next experiment they tested whether this function could be circumvented by bringing the bag extremely far away before the bear touched the books. Once more, upon the slight touch of the bear the books simply vanished, only to reappear in the bag. Covering Hank's paws with the skin of the giant fruit also had made no difference, since apparently physical contact of the bear, even if indirectly, led to the disappearance.

Over these two months both Hank and Adair had exhausted all options to open the 12 books. They had tried to pry the books open, they had tried to heat the book up in case they were somehow glued together, they had tried submerging the book in the lake and hundreds of other ideas but they had all ended in the same outcome.

Although Hank had initially enjoyed playing around with Adair like that, after all he too had been curious about the content of the books, after weeks of doing similar things without any improvement he had started to grow tired of it and no amount of annoying him changed this fact.

After the first few times of letting the bag out of his eyesight he had grown worried about the existence of animals or other creatures that could steal the bag, despite George claiming they were safe. Unfortunately, whenever she crossed a certain distance, her bear companion would simply follow her. Somehow Hank would know where the bag was at all times, even if he was asleep. Both times she had attempted to smuggle it out to test if there was something like a range limit to this safety measure, the bear had woken up and licked her face as punishment.

After the second time Hank had insisted that Adair could only continue tests with the books if she promised to stop playing around with the bag. She had argued that it would be impossible to lose the bag, since he seemed to be able to pinpoint its location, but the bear had remained stubborn. This had pissed off the little girl at first, but after thinking about it she had acknowledged the fact that her life and his would be much harder if something were to happen, as unlikely as it seemed.

Forced to concentrate on just the books, she had begun theorizing that perhaps the books were like the bag, only the opposite. To get stuff out of the bag, she had to wish it out, but perhaps with the books, she had to not think about opening the book to open it. Unfortunately, Adair had no idea how she was supposed to read the book if this was the case, but at least she had to try.

She had unsuccessfully tried opening the book while thinking about the book being closed shut, pretending to read a book, even flipping the perceived book shot, and even just reading each of the smaller books atop the larger ones out loud.

Desperate, she resorted to more drastic measures. She had made a deep gash on her arm and started to pour her blood into one of the bottles, intending to submerge the book in her blood, since the red liquid had already proven to have magical properties. After a few minutes of this, though, she realized that she had made a major mistake when she started to get light headed. Luckily, Hank had been close by, so hearing her cry for help the bear had come over and licked her wound.

It had closed at visible speed and while it had been unable to cure Adair from her lightheadedness, at least the little girl had no longer felt as if she would faint the next moment. Once she had regained some color in her face, she had asked her furry friend how he healed her, yet he could only answer that it had been a natural instinct his bear self possessed.

It had taken a few days for her to get back to normal, in which she had come to the decision that even if she had been right about how to open it, it was simply not worth risking her well-being.

She had also made up her mind to wait until her wings came in, before she would experiment further with the books.

As such, after these initial two months, she started spending her time asking bear more questions about the world and later the tree. Although she had vowed to stop feeding George's alcohol addiction, she had eventually run out of questions for Hank. Still too irritated to bother with the books, she had convinced herself that it couldn't be too bad for the tree if he got one bottle every other day, so that is what she started doing.

One of these days, while Adair had been asking George some questions, the tree suddenly stopped responding. She should still have some time left, since it hadn't been that long that she had given him his payment, but all of the leaves above Adair retracted... and for the first time since she had come to this forest she saw the sky.

It was dark blue with streaks of white clouds scattered throughout the sky.

Adair also saw one sun and two moons. This made her question what the other light source had been during the first storm she experienced. While thinking about it, she noticed that all of the clouds were converging on one spot in the distance. Then they started to pile up and turn pitch black, before starting to cover the sky. Adair wondered what could be causing this phenomenon, but she soon realized that she might be in the middle of a flood.

If the snow acted like it did back in the Galactic Empire and melted when the rain hit it, the whole area would soon be underwater. This scary possibility caused her to run back to the bear and inform him about what had happened. As soon as she did the bear also started to freak out. It then grabbed Adair in its mouth and put her at the end of the box.

After that, the bear quickly started to create a barrier of wood, trying to block off the box entrance, but it didn't appear to be working very well. Adair then went to the bag and tried to wish out items like tarps or bricks or anything that could block the entrance, but nothing came out.

Adair started to curse at herself for not learning how to swim with this body. While she had been a good swimmer back in the Galactic Empire, she hadn't had the chance to do any training in this world yet, since the only source of water had something similar to alcohol in it. She then started to hope that either the snow evaporated when the rain hit it or that the bear instinctively knew how to swim because if anything else happened, she had no idea how she was going to get out of this situation.

After a short while, the bear piled up everything that they had available in front of the entrance and began to look around for other items that it could use to barricade themselves inside. He found nothing though, so he went back to Adair and lay facing her to give himself the biggest probability to grab her and escape if necessary.

Both she and the bear then waited and waited, but nothing happened. As time passed, Adair wasn't sure how much time had passed because she could not see out of the box with everything the bear piled on in the front of the box. She was unable to determine whether there was still snow above the box because she could not look through the holes and see the sky.

As time began to pass, both she and Hank started to relax. The small regretted that the bag had nothing like a digital clock to check the time and her only form of entertainment were the small books, which at this point she had memorized by heart.

The duo waited and waited, only having their stomach as a sort of internal clock and after their second meal of the day, the stress eventually got to Adair, and she closed her eyes.